


Love Cuts The Strings

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Fluff and Smut, Happy Ending, Jug breaks up with a girlfriend at the very start, Kangs - Freeform, Light Angst, colour perception au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:14:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29089635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Jughead and Betty are coeditors of a college literary magazine who can't stand each other. Then they discover that they are soulmates.  This is how they deal with their predicament.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 104
Kudos: 103





	1. I Recognized You Though I'm Not Sure How.

His eyes fluttered open as he awakened but, feeling the warmth of the sleeping girl by his side, he closed them tightly. He wanted them to have this experience together. Nothing would ever be the same for them again. It was a special moment for a couple and he wanted it to be perfect. He had installed the app on his phone so he fumbled for it, knocking loose papers from the nightstand and cursing gently. She mumbled and stirred so he put his hand tenderly over her eyes. “What the hell Jug? What’re you doing?” 

“I’m opening up ‘Soul Truth.’ We can look together.”

“Oh J, no, don’t do that,” she moaned softly, beseechingly.

“Ssh, don’t worry. It’ll be great.” He kissed her, voice-activated the app and removed his hand from her eyes. She was looking at him, rather than the screen so he gently turned her head and looked down as she did. The screen was a uniform, dispiriting grey. His stomach lurched. It must be a glitch. “Wait, what a second,” he muttered, clicking the app closed before reopening it. Solid, unwavering grey. He looked at her and saw the sadness in her soft, almond shaped eyes. Sadness but not surprise. 

She reached out a hand and stroked his cheek softly, “Hey, I’m sorry J. I didn’t want to disappoint you but I already knew. I just didn’t feel it.”

“Jeez Roz, I’m so sorry. I can do better, you should have told me what you needed. I can be what you want. I thought you’d…I thought I felt you...”

“I did, J, of course I did. Listen. It was great. You were great. So tender and kind. It was beautiful and I really had a good time but it wasn’t…I don’t know. It wasn’t whatever soulmates have. You’ve heard Kevin talk about it. It’s next level. Transcendent. What we had was great sex, but it was just great sex. No angelic chorus. You had to feel that?” Ordinarily she was tough but now her voice was soft and conciliatory, trying not to hurt him. There was a painful lump in his throat.

“I thought it was transcendent, you were anyway. I’ve been falling in love with you Roz.” His voice was quavering. He was ashamed of his weakness. “It has to be a mistake. It’s the app. It has to be.” Abruptly, before she could say another word, he was out of bed and heading down the hallway. “Fangs,” he yelled. “You in there?” He stood waiting, shivering in his boxers, while disgruntled groaning emanated from the room, until eventually the door opened a crack and Fangs peered out at him, aggravated and sleepy.

“Jones, the building better be on fire. We didn’t get in til four from the cast party. What time is it?”

“Just after eight. Look, is this broken?”

Fangs looked at the proffered screen blearily, a small smile replacing the irritation on his face. “Aww cute bunny.” Jughead snatched the screen back and swiped up. An image appeared in the visible spectrum of a cartoon bunny rabbit holding out a carrot. The legend underneath read “I wuv you.” 

“Uggh, why don’t they have something with some gravitas? Shit. Fuck it!” Jug turned around just as Fangs understood the situation. 

“Oh my god Jughead! Did you and Rosaline finally do the do? Oh shit…you can’t see that can you? Oh Christ man, I’m so sorry.” 

Jug swallowed down his disappointment, just like he had been swallowing down his anger and sorrow and guilt and sadness for most of his life and shrugged at Fangs. “No biggie. Apparently I’m destined to die alone. Whatever.” He stalked off back to his own room only to find Roz already lacing her combat boots. “Roz, shit, can’t we talk about this? Don’t go. Maybe it’ll happen later, perhaps it’s not always instant?”

Her voice was low and sorrowful when she spoke. “J, I really care about you, you’re my good friend, but we’re both looking for something that we’re never going to be able to give each other. Let’s just take some time. Maybe in a few months we’ll be able to go back to being pals again. I’m really sorry that you’re disappointed.” With that she was gone in a whisk of braided hair and Cabotine perfume.

He sat on his bed and stared into space. He’d been so sure. They made sense as a couple, sharing a dark sense of humour, having the same taste in movies and music. There was never any stress or conflict with her. It was easy to be with her. She indulged his bad moods and cajoled him out of his sulks with junk food and silly jokes. He knew enough to leave her well alone when she was getting into one of her rages. Gradually, as they had worked together on the documentary project, he found himself wanting to touch her hair, wanting to hold her tiny body against his in a protective embrace, wanting to make her feel good with his touches. She’d seemed uncertain but he’d persevered, wooed her really. Then finally, excited and giddy after their documentary project had taken first place at the showcase she’d kissed him and whispered, “Do you want to go back to your place?” He’d been so happy as they’d crunched through the first snow of the winter back to his apartment. He’d been wondering for a while if it might happen when they finished the film. While sex tended to be the main way that a soul bond was revealed, it also happened pretty often on completion of some other kind of shared project, Kevin and Fangs had found their connection as they took the curtain call on the last night of La Cage aux Folles at the end of sophomore year. It hadn’t happened for Jug and Roz at the showcase but he’d been so sure that if they made love, it would finally click and love would be revealed to them. But then it hadn’t happened.

The app was the latest way to check. Before the advent of the smart phone, folks had a painting or a poster in their homes. To those who weren’t matched it would look like an ordinary scene but once a soul bond was formed, the missing colour in the spectrum was revealed, and the soulmates could read the message in the image. It was like one of those magic eye posters. You looked at it for a moment or two and then the missing colour reconciled itself into words or an image. Usually they had some trite inspirational quotation. The one in the trailer he grew up in had, his mom had once told him, the Rolling Stones’ lyric, “If you try sometime, you find, you get what you need.” Amusingly FP and Gladys had been neither what the other wanted nor what they needed. Later it would turn out that FP had lied when he stood in front of that ragged edged poster and told the innocent, love struck young girl, wrapped in the sheet from his bed, that he saw it for the first time too. Actually he’d already bonded with someone else, someone far too smart to get tied up with a no-account gang member from the wrong side of the tracks. He must have thought it was his lucky day when the beautiful girl he’d been romancing excitedly told him that she could see the colour for the first time, a second chance for happiness with someone too naive to protect herself. He’d nodded enthusiastically, said, “Yeah, me too,” and, in return for her love and trust, given her a life filled with damp trailers, drunken arguments and angry guys repossessing their truck, or the tv, or the kids’ toys. She’d stayed because she believed he was her soulmate. She thought she had no other options until, in a drunken rage, he’d revealed that it had always been a lie. She snatched up her daughter and left him the next day. She discarded the boy, unwilling to take a kid who looked so much like the man she had been fool enough to trust and who had ruined her life with his lies. Jughead couldn’t find it in himself to blame her too much, deep down he agreed with her evaluation of him and his dad. Much later he’d reconnected with his sister but his mother still couldn’t bear to look at him so he kept away from her, figuring she’d been put through enough by Jones men.

The fact that scumbags with no moral scruples lied about something as important, as fucking spiritual as that, had led to the development of checking apps like Soul Truth, “the truth, the soul truth and nothing but the truth” according to the tag line. You both looked at the screen and made a note of what you saw, then swiped up and the image was revealed in ordinary unbonded colours. It made it harder for predators and perverts to take advantage of young innocents while their good sense was overwhelmed by romantic fantasies. It also revealed that about ten percent of bonds were unreciprocated like Jughead’s parents, one of the couple bonded and the other didn’t. Those couples had to decide if they would make that work, aware that one was more invested than the other, or choose to part, hoping that the tidal pull to their partner would fade, that the colour would gradually seep from the world to leave it faded and sere. Jug guessed he should be relieved that he hadn’t seen the colour that morning since, clearly, Roz was just not that into him.

He’d been sitting on the edge of the bed like that, staring at the rug, for thirty minutes when Fangs tapped softly on the door. “Not now,” he snapped but Fangs ignored him and pushed open the door. They’d been assigned roommates in freshman year and had formed a steady if undemonstrative friendship. When it came time to find a place away from the campus they decided they could tolerate each other’s idiosyncrasies well enough to stay together. Fangs was kind and loyal, a caring friend to Jug and later a levelling partner for Kevin who had never met a boundary he hadn’t overstepped or a confidence he hadn’t overshared. Since their bonding Kevin was in their apartment more than at his own place, belting out show tunes in the shower and leaving glitter and greasepaint over the furniture, but he and Fangs were a pair so Jug learned to accept him too.

Fangs was consoling, “Ok Jug. I know you’re upset right now, but it just means you haven’t found her yet. She’s still out there and if you go into one of your epic sulks you’ve got less chance of finding her. What classes have you got today?”

“Nothing I can’t cancel. Everyone’s cramming for finals. I was supposed to meet the Princess to go over the final layout for the literary magazine. She can do it on her own. She’ll like that better anyway.” 

Now Kevin joined his boyfriend in the room, both of them making him feel self indulgent and guilty with their solicitousness. “You shouldn’t shut yourself away and mope, Jughead. Go and edit like a champ and then come by the theatre for us and we’ll go for burgers. We’re striking the set today but we can take a break. Our treat. What do you say?”

Jughead pondered for a moment. Nothing was going to change if he sat here, the Princess would be unbearable if he blew her off, and burgers on someone else’s tab were his favourite kind of burgers, so he grudgingly allowed himself to be persuaded. 

An hour later he was in the midst of a heated argument with the Princess about his perfectly legitimate decision to kill a terrible poem about the fall which she, inexplicably, had marked for an already overcrowded page four. “You can’t just take things out without consultation Ferdinand. We’re an editorial committee, we make decisions together. It’s supposed to be a collaboration.”

“What, you want to keep this pile of third grade horseshit do you? And the F isn’t for Ferdinand. You aren’t going to guess it. And you’re only doing it to make me mad. Don’t think I don’t know.”

“I didn’t say that. It’s terrible. It obviously has to go. But you can’t just do it unilaterally. And you can’t call me Princess and not expect me to retaliate. My name isn’t a secret.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Princess... sorry, my humblest apologies, for fuck’s sake _Betty_. What the hell are we arguing about if we both think it’s bad and needs to go? And why is it even in here in the first place?”

“It’s in there because we were waiting on your egregiously late piece of sub Lovecraftian geek porn. I was filling space. Since you finally got your ass in gear we don’t need it anymore. So spike it.” She had this way of making him feel like he lost, even when he won an argument. It was infuriating.

They worked on pagination for another couple of hours with surprisingly little conflict, and then he wrote kickers for a few of the longer submissions, hoping to tempt the reader to give a story a chance. She made sure the submissions were correctly attributed and that the running heads and page numbers and folios were in place. He had to admit she had an excellent eye for detail. Finally it seemed that they were done. He clicked back to the front page, checked the position of the artwork and the masthead and looked over at her with a questioning expression to see if she was satisfied. She nodded her approval and, at last, under the words “Joint Editors”, he typed "Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones.” As he clicked ‘save’ something shifted in his field of vision. He was alarmed, pushing back from the desk and looking around, meeting her startled eyes. Her green eyes, which weren’t green anymore. He couldn’t describe what colour they were, there were no words, at least none he was prepared to use.

“What just happened?” she whispered, obviously badly frightened. 

“Does…does anything look different to you?” he replied, hesitantly, reaching for his phone and noticing with a lurch to his stomach that the case wasn’t the dark blue that it had been when he put it on the desk.

“Yes, everything. What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. Look at this.” He pulled up the app. On the screen, clearly outlined in a colour he’d never seen before, he could make out, without difficulty, a cartoon cat, Pusheen maybe, its paws deep in some dough. The caption read “I knead you.” As he read the words in his head, she said them aloud. “Fuuuuck,” he murmured. “I think we’re soulmates, Princess.”

She hadn’t taken that news like it was the fulfilment of her girlish dreams, which was fine because she wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind when he’d imagined his soulmate. She was so fucking vanilla. She had this swingy golden hair and large, brilliant eyes and a frankly distracting rack clad softly in a lilac sweater. If you asked some dumb jock to pick out a beautiful girl from a line up he would jab a sausage-like finger at her and grunt. She was straightforwardly beautiful. There didn’t seemed to be a crack for the light to get in as Leonard Cohen would say, no intriguing imperfections, just a perfect, symmetrical, glittering diamond. And she was judgemental and self righteous, always assuming she was right about everything, which was irritating even when she _was_ right. Anyway she stared at him for a few more seconds and then said “I’m not going to bed with you so you can forget that,” as if he’d been rubbing himself against her like a horny poodle.

“That feeling is more than mutual Princess,” he retorted even though he had been half heartedly wondering if it was more or less obligatory to seal the deal. 

“It must be some kind of mistake. We don’t even like each other. Maybe it’ll wear off.”

“We can hope,” he said, beginning to sulk. She didn’t need to be so fucking rude about it. Plenty of girls liked him, some guys did too. He didn’t need her gold stamp of approval.

“I’m going. I need to lie down. Are we done here?”

“Done and done, Princess.” 

She stared at him for a moment. “Look, I’m sorry if I’m being… mean about this. It’s just a shock — for both of us. I’m going home for Christmas in a couple of days but I’ll text you. We can talk about all this when we get back. I just need some time to process everything. Right?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, not looking at her as she gathered up the many bags and belongings she always seemed to tote around and left. She needed time to process the fact that the universe had sent her his sorry ass instead of a Walmart heir with a private jet and a pastel coloured sweater draped over his shoulders like a douche. Process away, Princess, process away.

He was pretty mad about it. Mad with her obviously, for being so ungracious and unwilling to explore what this meant but then again he could see it from her side. She didn’t owe him anything. She’d be wise to walk away, he’d walk away from him if he could. Mostly he was mad at the universe, at fate. He’d always been the butt of some existential joke. Most of the people he knew had family to draw back the bow that would launch them off into the world. He’d had FP Jones. He’d had to tug on the string for himself and it had been hard. Sometimes he thought it had made him hard in its turn, the effort, the sacrifice, the refusal to let anything hold him back. Archie’s family had been kind to him. They gave him a refuge when it was clear that he would spiral into crime without help and he was grateful to them but he and Archie had really only been friends in middle school. They had nothing but history in common. He’d felt like an interloper, a cuckoo in the nest. 

He’d imagined, like a fool, that everything would be different when he finally found his soulmate. There would be someone who was for him before anyone else, who would accept his love without hesitation or vacillation. There had been no reason to think that, it would have been an exception to all of his experience of the world to date. He, like his father, had nothing to offer a soulmate, so both the Princess and the woman who’d rejected FP had, understandably, saved themselves rather than being dragged down with the unseaworthy vessel that was a Jones man. 

He spent the unfestive break at his dad’s trailer, feeling blue, reading Rimbaud and writing quotations in his notebook, “the rose-coloured blood of green trees.” He FaceTimed with his sister enjoying her holly-jolly Christmas vicariously. She was the only person to whom he mentioned the colour and the girl and, even with her, he avoided specifics, resorting to the “it’s complicated” tag. By the time he had to head back to campus he was able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation and himself. He threw his notebook in the trash and got back on the bike.

He’d been back three days when she texted, “Beacon cafe, 10.30 tomorrow. OK?” Since they were being concise he replied with “K” and left it at that.

She got there before him. He wasn’t even late but it sure felt like he was when he saw her, sitting in the window, illuminated by the pale yellow sunlight, dragging a spoon in aimless circles around her coffee cup. He took his place in line, trying to catch her eye to see if she wanted anything but she wouldn’t look over, so once he was next up, he yelled across, “Princess, shall I get you something?” She flushed pink as the other customers looked at her and shook her head vehemently before staring down at her cup, letting the gilded hair fall forward to hide her face. That suggested that he’d probably been wrong about that too. Christ on a cracker. He got his coffee and went over to join her, sitting next to her rather than across the table so that he didn’t have to look at her eyes and get tongue-tied and bewildered by her. Naturally, that meant that she had to move her bag and her coat and all the other shit she seemed to be carrying about with her, which she did with as much bad grace and huffing impatience as if he’d started lapping his coffee from a puddle on the table. 

“Good holidays?” he asked politely, showing interest in her life even though, having seen an L L Bean commercial, he was pretty sure he knew all that he needed to about how she spent the break.There would have been snowy mountains and apple cheeked, nordic looking folk in jewel hued puffer jackets and knitted hats with scarlet pompoms laughing heartily as they threw snowballs at each other. No-one would have been drunk. No-one would have yelled obscenities at anyone before storming out and slamming the door. No-one would have woken up on Christmas morning in a frigid, empty, tobacco stained trailer and wondered with casual curiosity if their remaining parent was dead in a ditch.

She replied to his query with “Mmmh,” and didn’t, thankfully, reciprocate the enquiry. Clearly he was to be expected to carry the weight of the conversation alone. Apparently she was one of those girls that demanded to be entertained. If they were to go on a date together she probably wouldn’t even consider picking up the tab. He would be expected to be charming and complimentary, keep her laughing with witty repartee and, if he had passed muster, she might allow him to give her an orgasm. If he expected her to return the favour, a meaningful nudge to the crown of her head, he’d be the monster. It just wasn’t going to work. He might as well as get a to-go cup and get gone. He’d begun to reach for his coffee when she looked up and he noticed that her fascinating eyes were wet. What the fuck had he done now?

“Did you actually want to know or are you just being polite?’ she asked quietly. 

He’d been going for polite but the tears changed all that. He reached out to where her pale hand lay on the table but then thought better of it and picked up his cup instead. Her manicure was chipped, he’d never seen her less than immaculate before and the ragged rose of her polish made his heart ache a little. “Tell me. What happened?”

“Just my mom being a piece of work. She’s cancelled my allowance because I swapped my major without telling her. Which means my rent doesn’t get paid. But I’ll figure it out I guess.”

“Why did you switch?”

“I was journalism until the start of senior year, trying to live out my mom’s fantasy of winning a Pulitzer, but now I’m psych. I decided to do what I wanted with my life. She doesn’t approve of me or my choices.”

He was about to suggest ways to solve her problem, jobs, loans, financial aid, when it occurred to him that she probably would figure it out. She wasn’t asking for solutions. Telling him had been a gesture, she was sharing something with him. “I’m really sorry. It’s tough that she doesn’t want you to be you. Tense times over the turkey.”

She smiled at him and he was falling into those eyes, the new colour surrounding and embracing him in loveliness. He shook himself out of it and took a sip of coffee, styling it out when it burned his lips. “What about your holidays? Fun?” she asked.

“Depends on your definition of fun,” he smiled. “It’s a horror show. Let’s save it for another time.” Partly to deflect from a personal history that no-one could want and partly to clear the grey clouds of sadness from those incredible eyes he held out an olive branch. “You busy? We could do something. Wanna go to the beach?”

“Oh I don’t know. I have to work.”

“Hey classes have barely started. You can’t have anything to do yet.”

“No, work work. Mulligan’s, the Irish bar on Beacon Hill, six til midnight, five nights a week.”

He was very relieved that he hadn’t mansplained the idea of paid labour to her; she was working more hours than he was. “You’ll be back in time. I have wheels.” She shrugged and picked up her jacket and her purse and an umbrella decorated with rainbows and a pair of mittens, checking around the table to see if she had overlooked anything, maybe her possum or a tea service, he mused.

It was a cold morning, clear and crisp, especially on the promontory in Massachusetts Bay occupied by the campus. There had been a hard, vitreous frost overnight but a winter sun the colour of an early primrose was high enough by the time they left the cafe to have the branches of the few trees shaking off the melting ice. He led her towards the bike and was passing her a helmet when he noticed her horrified expression. She stepped backwards as if he had offered her a dirty syringe and suggested that she give H a whirl.

“What?” he asked.

“I can’t go on that. It’s so dangerous.”

“It’s not dangerous if you’re with someone who knows what they’re doing. And I do. Come on, swing a leg over here. Let me stow some of your luggage.” He took the umbrella from her and secured it with bungee cord as she stood shuffling uncertainly. He could tell she wanted to but she wasn’t accustomed to taking risks with her safety.

“Come on, where’s the freedom fighter who changes her major without permission and gets cut off without a penny?” That was it. She stepped forward and as he got onto the bike she mounted herself behind him.

“Do I hold onto you or what?” she asked, a little muffled by the helmet.

“Yeah sure,” he said, not pointing out the grab bars, and they were off.

It was a chilly twenty minute ride and they could see their breath in the air when they took off their helmets. He nodded towards the beach and when she looked in the direction he indicated she gasped. He smiled because he’d had exactly the same reaction when he had stopped here, shivering, aching and desperate for coffee, on his way back to college after Christmas. The sand glittered with the colour. He didn’t feel like he could use the name for the hue when things were still so awkward between them but he didn’t need to, the colour spoke for itself.

She looked at him and her eyes, the exact colour of the beach, were full of wonder. He realised that they hadn’t even mentioned colour at the coffee shop. They strolled down to the shore line, frost clinging to the sand in spite of the salty breeze from the silver water. As they walked, surrounded by the newness of the colour, she stooped occasionally to pick up the sea glass that littered the beach, slipping pieces into her pocket. Soon he was bending too, passing her the rounded pebbles of blue and turquoise glass that he found, first rubbing his thumb over the edges to check that they weren’t jagged. He noticed her watching him and felt self conscious, like she’d caught him picking a flower or something similarly unmanly.

“I hadn’t really thought about how it would change everything,” she said softly.

“I know,’ he agreed, glad to have someone to talk to about it. “I just thought that I’d be able to see another colour, not that everything would look different.” 

I know. It’s in everything isn’t it? It’s so weird when something you see everyday completely changes. My wallpaper at home isn’t really pink like I thought. I kept waking up wondering where I was.”

“Yeah…,” he said uncertainly.

“What? What are you thinking? Is it not like that for you?”

“No, it is. I guess I just wonder if that’s the way to think about it. Like actually where is the colour, any colour? Nothing really changed out there when it happened did it? The change happened in us. So there’s the stuff out in the world, trucking along, doing it’s thing and then there’s us trying to scoop it up and stuff it into our brains like we’re at the all you can eat Chinese buffet; but we can’t. Imagine living like that, endless egg rolls on top of Kung Pao Chicken and spicy shrimp at six in the morning. Not even I could take it.”

Betty shuddered, “I’m sure this is a great analogy but I’m not following it. Like at all.”

I’m saying that what’s out there in the world isn’t really how it seems when it gets into our heads. It’s been arranged, structured. Like when my pal’s family took me to the all you can eat, his mom said what I was allowed to get and in what order I could take it. She didn’t just let me stand at the buffet and chow down until I got sick. Not after the first time anyhow. She just kept some things from me. Now if I go, I can have what I want. The buffet’s the same but I’m different.” She was looking at him in complete bafflement and he realised the metaphor had gotten out of hand. “The change isn’t out there, it’s in us. We changed, not your wallpaper. We let it in.”

“Okay… and?”

“And that means that we can change how we see things, how they seem to us. We’re making the world with our brains, it’s not given, it’s created, curated. Shit, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”

“No, I see. It’s like confirmation bias. We only accept the data that fits in with our theories about the world. If we believe something different we see different facts. That makes perfect sense."

“Well I like my imagery better but yeah. That.” They walked a little further, both thinking about the changes that their new reality had brought with it.

“Did you tell anyone?” he asked at last

“I talked to my roommate before I left for the holidays. She just kept asking me to describe it but I can’t. I guess you can, being the wordsmith and all,” she replied, with a smile to show she wasn’t mocking him.

“Not really. I tried to tell my sister about it but she just kept asking if it was closer to blue or red and it isn’t either. It’s just its own thing. I guess it’s like explaining colour to a blind person. The only way you could do it is with associations and metaphors. We need the language for it. Red is rage and passion, blood and heat. Or green, “the sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures.” So … this colour is… but I don’t have the associations yet. I haven’t got a vocabulary for it. It’s this frosty, clean beach with the ozone and the sound of the waves and cold, smooth glass between my fingers.”

“Yeah, the morning after I got home, I went for a run. It was in the sky so I guess for me it’ll always be a run on a cold morning in the woods, frozen leaves cracking under my feet and a cardinal singing somewhere. Peaceful but alive. And this too now. And it’s in your hair, just a few strands.”

“Is it?” he said, pulling a hank in front of his face and going cross eyed to see. 

“Out in the daylight, yeah,” she smiled as he pulled faces, "what I saw of it when you swapped the helmet for the hat.”

He glanced at her, “And your eyes. Looking at me and being crushed with disappointment.”

“I’m not… it isn’t you,” she replied, looking down at the sand to avoid giving him that experience again. “It’s just that we’re not, I don’t know, compatible. I’m conventional, SUVs and suburbia, box sets on the tv, you’re motorcycles and loft apartments full of your bohemian friends, parties til two a.m.”

He didn’t know where she’d got the idea of him as a party guy, or a guy with friends for that matter. “Well, first I don’t know anyone with a loft and two, you came here on a motorcycle,” he pointed out. “You didn’t seem to mind it.”

“No, I didn’t. I liked it but it’s not who I am. And anyway you have a girlfriend don’t you? Rose? Rosa? With the hair and the boots and the…”

He raised an eyebrow and waited for her to complete the thought, intrigued by her hot take on Roz.

“…moxie?” she offered at last in a diffident voice. He shrugged. It was true, she did have moxie.

“Rosaline. We broke up.” She looked horrified so he rushed to explain. “Not because of this. We were done before this happened. Anyway I guess you’re right. I’m not the kind of guy you’d want to take home to meet mom and pops, especially not yours by the sound of things, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be one to hold down a nine to five or coach little league. I guess sometimes the universe makes a mistake.” She nodded slowly and gave a pinched smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’d better get you back,” he said, unwilling to impose himself on her when she’d been clear about the dismissal. He dropped her off outside an enviable brownstone in Ashmont that had him wondering how she was going to make the rent, and he went home to get on with his own work. He was facing an imminent deadline which should have been enough to distract him from rerunning their conversation in his head, looking for subtext and nuance. Even so he found himself wondering about her choice of the word moxie, her willingness to throw her leg over the saddle of the bike, the feeling of her hands at his waist as they rode. Most of all he thought about her self analysis and whether it was accurate. He’d been a little surprised that she’d stand up to her mother, that she’d work in a bar, that she wanted a career helping people with messy mental health problems. He wondered if she were as bourgeois as either of them thought.


	2. A Dull Chill Came Down

He wasn’t going to chase her. His self esteem was nowhere near robust enough to withstand the inevitable knock back so it was pure chance that he found himself in Mulligans that weekend. Kevin had decided to celebrate his birthday by embracing the culture of his forefathers and it would have been rude to refuse the invitation. Admittedly, rude was not normally something Jughead concerned himself about but, as he said to Fangs, it was a new year and he could try new things if he chose. He didn’t see her at first and he supposed it was one of her nights off. He was considering making an appropriately Irish exit when he spotted her returning from the restrooms with a mop and bucket. She looked uncharacteristically dishevelled, her jeans inky with water stains, her hair old gold rather than its normal shiny twenty four carat. He pushed through the crowd at the bar and said “Hey,” before even considering that he should have armed himself with some engaging conversation starters.

“Oh hey,” she said, meeting his witty opening with her own sparkling reply. She glanced down at her jeans which actually seemed pretty sodden. As conversationalists they were knocking this out of the park. She looked up at him and shrugged. “Toilet was blocked. Overflowing. I had to kneel in the water and get my hand in the trap. There was underwear down there. I mean, what the hell? Really it’s the glamour of this job that I love.”

He was surprised that she’d be willing to put aside her royal dignity and get intimate with the plumbing. “You’re pretty wet,” he observed. Perspicuity, that was bound to impress her, he was a regular Sherlock Holmes.

“Yeah, I’m going to change. Are you here for a while? I’m on my break in ten minutes.” 

“Sure. Be right here. Shall I get you a drink?” He glanced over to see Fangs and Kevin grinning at him like a pair of hyenas. He’d caved and told them about the colour and he could see them putting together the puzzle of Jughead Jones accepting an invitation to a bar.

“Make it an order of fries and it’s a deal. Only greasy carbs can lift my mood at this point.” He saluted with a finger to his brow as she headed off to a door marked Private. 

He ordered fries and onion rings and hot wings and then, as an insurance policy, potato skins. She returned as the symphony of brown food was delivered to him, grabbed a bottle of water from behind the bar and took a seat alongside him. She had changed into purple running leggings that kept drawing his eyes back to her ass. “So what brings you here? You aren’t a regular,” she asked, a little suspiciously.

“Birthday. Kevin’s exploring his Hibernian heritage.” He waved a hand and the raucous party yelled his name in a kind of tribal cry, Kevin raising a glass of Guinness in which he’d placed a cocktail umbrella.

“Oh I didn’t realise,” she gasped, a hand to her lips. “I’m taking you away from your friends. I’m sorry. I normally take my break in the back anyway,” she began to stand, looking at the skins with a fondness that made him jealous.

“No, really. I’m glad of the change of pace. I’m not much of a drinker. It’s getting a little rowdy for me,” he reassured her and nodded at the plate of potatoey goodness to encourage her.

“Really? You surprise me. I’d have thought you were all about the fast living, hard drinking, Hemingway, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson vibe,” she replied, teasing a little.

“My dad’s an alcoholic. I keep clear. Addictive personality so I have to be careful.”

“Shit, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” She was red with embarrassment and had put down the onion ring she was holding in horror at her misstep.

“How could you know? It’s fine. How are your classes this semester?’ She smiled, obviously grateful to him for changing the subject.

“Good thanks. I've picked up some volunteer hours at a mental health clinic which is so amazing. It’s made me even more sure that it’s what I want to do. You?”

“Yeah, all good. I’m getting my MFA submissions ready so, you know, pretty busy.”

“We had a class together once. You don’t remember do you?” she said with a smile.

“Really? I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered you,” he blurted before realising what he’d said. She raised an eyebrow to show him that she’d noticed the slip but carried on.

“Yeah, we did. Freshman year. Ethics. I sat at the front with my binders and highlighters, arrived early and tried to answer questions. You came late, sat at the back and never wrote anything down.”

“I didn’t make a favourable impression obviously,” he observed, wondering if this was why she’d always been so hostile to him.

“I think you made exactly the impression that you were going for. It was kind of a frustrating class for me. Some of the ideas were pretty interesting but there never seemed to be a conclusion, or any practical suggestions. It never achieved anything. It was just this endless, unresolved discussion that churned around and around so that a few people who liked to hear themselves talk could grandstand. And then there was you, allergic to consensus. Every time we got to a position on some issue that everyone agreed with, you’d chime in with some laconic little aphorism to problematise it and then sit back and smirk as the debate blew up all over again. You made me crazy. I wanted to write down the answer and you kept getting in the way.”

“Sorry,” he winced a little. He’d been “that guy” in a lot of his classes. It’d been a strange time for him. “I… was finding my feet that year. High school was miserable. I wouldn’t be caught dead at a reunion, but if I did go, people would assume I was some random guy crashing the party. I got bullied when I was younger but then family stuff happened and I spent some time living with the big shot football player. It put an end to the bullying but, if no-one was shoving me in the dumpsters, I was invisible. I never spoke in a class, never put my head above the parapet. When I got to college it seemed like a new start. I’d been given the scholarship so I wondered if maybe I had something worth saying. I was trying that out.”

“What scholarship?”

“There was a writing competition. The prize was a full scholarship. I couldn’t have thought about college without it.”

“What did you write? Can I read it?”

He made a dismissive sound, “Nah, juvenilia’s always terrible. I’ll send you a copy of my novel if I ever get published. Anyway I’m sorry if I was a dick in ethics.”

“I think it was as much me as you to be honest. I’ve always liked everything neat and tidy, clear answers and solutions to problems. I’m learning that life isn’t really like that. Those easy answers are pretty much always lies. Real life’s rarely easy.”

“Never, in my experience,” he smiled. “I must have really irritated you though, for you to remember me for that long.”

“You did but also, you know…” He looked at her blankly.

“Well, it was you so…”. He still had no idea what she was saying. He raised an eyebrow quizzically.

“You know. All this.” She gestured sweepingly up and down his body, her face red again.

“What 'this'?” he asked, glancing down to see if his fly was unbuttoned. 

“All the girls were swooning over you after every class. Your name is still scrawled over the stalls in the women’s bathroom. You had to know that.” It was his turn to blush.

“I guess things were a little different in that way too when I got to college.”

“Turnstile on your bedroom door,” she muttered.

“You’d be surprised,” he replied as Kevin barrelled into him from behind, yelling that he had to come back to the table and bring his friend. Kevin was affable when sober, drunk he was positively effusive, handing out flyers for a cabaret night he was organising and hugging Betty like she was an old friend. She came over and sat with them for the last few minutes of her break, being complimented on her hair and her figure in a way that would have had a straight guy up on a charge if he'd done it.

“I have to be getting back to work,” she said at last. “Thanks so much for the food Jughead. Be seeing you. It was so nice to meet you all.” He nodded and spent the rest of the evening pondering the mixed blessing that had been his conversation with the Princess. On the one hand she had seemed to imply that she wasn’t physically repulsed by him. Unfortunately that meant that it was his personality that she found obnoxious. He knew he had a tendency to take things too far, to be pointlessly needling and combative. He didn’t always notice when people were becoming uncomfortable. He’d grown up in a world where an argument wasn’t significant unless blows were involved, where even trivial discourse was held in raised voices with wild gesticulations. He had recalibrated to a degree but he knew he could still seem arrogant and aggressive when he didn’t intend to be. She had no right to assume he was promiscuous though. There had been girls in freshman year when he still couldn’t believe that anyone would look at him like that but once he realised that, without friendship and affection, the act itself was unsatisfactory and stressful, he retrenched. There had been three girls in the last three years, and he’d hoped at the time that every one of them would be his soulmate. He’d hoped, in fact, that every one of them would be her. It was wrong of her to assume that the fact that he had sexual opportunities meant he was some kind of Lothario. She didn’t know him because she’d chosen not to bother finding out about him. She’d decided to judge him instead. He was also irritated by his own neediness. She’d been clear that she wasn’t interested in him, they were “incompatible.” He could have other girls, he didn’t need to keep returning to thoughts of her like he was some devoted puppy dog. Plenty of other folks never met their soulmate and that was just fine. He knew a lot of guys, Archie for instance, who actively tried to avoid it, not wanting to be tied down and forced to make it work with one particular woman. Jug wished he could find just a little self respect and move on from her. 

For the next two weeks he was proof-reading his manuscript whenever he wasn’t in class or in the library. Sometimes the activities overlapped but he was discreet or intimidating enough that his professors didn’t call him out. It was good to have a distraction from the thoughts of her that crowded his mind whenever the colour was especially obvious. His hard work would all be worthwhile when the royalty checks started to trickle in. He’d already set aside the advance for his year’s rent so disposable funds were running pretty low. At Christmas Jellybean had been dropping heavy hints about needing a car and he wasn’t going to let Gladys source that, it’d be hot and there’d be china white in the upholstery. Forsythia Pendleton would buy it for her as soon as “Lindens Line the Promenades” fulfilled its promise. It was another dumb romance story, this time a penniless young composer in the Berlin of that _sturm und drang_ Romantic era falling in love with a girl far above his station. It was overwrought with angst and drama just as his readers liked it but he brought it to a tasteful and happy culmination. For some reason Forsythia had hit a pretty profitable seam with these stories, ballrooms and bodices as he thought of them. He wrote them quickly and they turned a good profit. If he was lucky no-one would ever associate his real writing with them, the literary fiction to which he aspired would be unsullied by their yearning and their too unambiguous consummations.

On the evening of Kevin and Fang’s cabaret night he’d been finalising the manuscript for twelve hours straight and could barely keep his eyes open. He was close to finally being ready to hand it off to the publisher when there was a knock at his bedroom door that he would have ignored if it wasn’t followed by Fangs and Kev standing in the doorway in coordinating purple and fuchsia bow ties and sequinned vests. “Come on Jug, you need to change or we’ll be late,” said Kev in a way that implied that there was any way on God’s green earth that Jughead Jones would be caught dead anywhere near a cabaret. 

“Guys, thanks so much for thinking of me," he said sarcastically. "Now get out of here you crazy kids. When I finish this I’ll be sleeping like the dead,” he replied, turning back to his screen. They tried guilt, FOMO, name calling and bribery to persuade him, but he stood firm. Even if he hadn’t been cross eyed with exhaustion he couldn’t picture himself sitting alone at one of those little round tables while Kev belted out torch songs or a girl he didn’t know disrobed in front of him. He knew how to behave in the Whyte Wyrm or the campus cafe but night clubs and theatres were still too much of a culture shock. Eventually the theatre kids took off without him and he dragged himself through the last of the pages, moving the work into the living room when he ran out of space to arrange his printouts and sticky notes. Eventually he fell into a fitful sleep on the couch when he simply couldn’t keep his eyes open a moment longer. 

He was awoken by crashing and giggling followed by shushing that was, if anything, even louder. He dragged himself upright and wiped the drool from his face only to realise that Betty was standing in front of him in his own living room in a tight red dress that had him wondering if he was still dreaming and, worse, all of Forsythia’s pages were on display around him. He’d rather have been found surrounded by the most mortifying pornography. She picked up a pile of papers to sit down on the beanbag, “Hey Jughead. Why weren’t you at the cabaret? What’s all this?”

She was flushed and her eyes were glittering. She was significantly sozzled. He grabbed the pages from her and scrambled to gather the rest as Kev and Fangs appeared with glasses and a bottle of wine that she really didn’t need. “Hey, it’s ‘all work no play Jones,’” Kev chuckled. “Betty here was supportive enough to come to our event. Wasn’t that kind of her? She came back afterwards and we didn’t even have a drink to give her so we kidnapped her and brought her home with us.”

Jug was more concerned to get his manuscript out of sight than to protest the implication that he was unkind and unsupportive so he simply nodded and piled the pages under his laptop and held them to his chest. “You seem to have had a good time,” he said with only a hint of snark.

“I did. It was so great. I’ve never been to anything like it before. You should have come.” 

“Not really my scene,” he mumbled, feeling exposed and vulnerable to have her in his space without time to prepare, still drowsy and stupid from sleep. “I’ll be off to bed. Night all.” Kevin and Fangs collapsed into his space on the couch as he stood and he headed into the kitchen to get a glass of water, still cradling his manuscript to himself.

As he filled a water glass in the dim kitchen she came in behind him and switched on the harsh strip light that he’d been avoiding to keep from burning out his retinas. “Seriously, why didn’t you come? I thought you’d be there,” she asked and he couldn’t tell if she was upset for his slighted roommate or if she’d been hoping to see him.

“Do I seem like a cabaret guy? All that raw emotion and lingerie on display? So not in my wheelhouse.” She was in the doorway so he couldn’t get past her without being rude. “Anyway I had to work.”

“Yeah, what is that? Is it a book?”

“Just some proof reading. It’s nothing.”

“Well you seem pretty protective of it. Is it dirty? Can I read it?”

“No. Look I’m really tired. I don’t mean to be rude…”

“You said something that day. On the beach. You said that we can let things in or not. We can change. You aren’t letting things in. You should have come. I think we would have had a good time. I was disappointed.”

“You’ve had a drink or seven. You don’t even like me.”

“I might decide to change my view. Anyway I want to show you something. Payback for the food and the beach trip. Will you?”

“Sure, as long as it isn’t cabaret.”

“It isn’t. We’ll go on Sunday, OK? I’ll pick you up at eleven.” She turned on her heel and called back to the living room, “Thanks for the drink and the show guys. Night,” and headed to the door. He felt like he’d been ambushed but it occurred to him that he’d kind of enjoyed it.

He became more and more anxious with each passing hour as Sunday approached. He tried to analyse his feelings to understand why he was being such a dweeb. He finally had to admit that the problem was “the thing with feathers,” as Dickinson called it. Hope. He kept hoping that she would change her mind and decide to want him. He felt like the books in the wire basket inside the bookshop door, remainder marked and discarded. That stoked the embers of his anger at the injustice of it all. It seemed to him that people ought to be able to rely on the love of their mother and their soulmate. He’d been rejected by both. To miss out on one essential human relationship might be unlucky, to miss both of them looked like an estimation of his merit. Seeing her kept reminding him that he was radically unlovable. Clearly there was some deep and unregarded part of his psyche that was imagining that he could persuade Betty to reread the blurb, reconsider the cover art, flick through a few pages and decide to give him a chance despite their incompatibility. It was the hope that was making him anxious and unsettled so he decided to take away its power. He would tell her when they met that he didn’t want to spend any more time with her, that it would be better for them both to let the connection drop. She wasn’t for him anyway. His mother’s bond to FP had been a disastrous mistake and so had theirs. Her bourgeois sensibilities and her conventionality would stifle him no matter how beautiful and smart she was. He wanted someone like Roz, someone who liked what he liked not someone who called him out on his shit and wanted him to do things that took him out of his comfort zone. 

When she buzzed up from the street on Sunday morning he ran down, two and three steps at a time, instead of letting her up. It would be better to see what she wanted to show him and then end things, clean, straightforward and direct. Of course when he saw her there, on the street, her hair tumbling over the collar of her wine coloured winter coat, furry pink ear muffs and a red nose it all became a little more complicated but he’d done harder things and he knew he had right on his side. She hoisted her huge tote bag onto her other shoulder and took his arm, steering him down the street to the bus stop, shaking her head when he asked if he should get the bike. “No, it’s my turn to take charge. It’s only a couple of stops and it’s fun to look at the city. Come on.”

As they travelled Betty pointed out the way the colour had changed the way the familiar landmarks looked. He hadn’t noticed most of them, more concerned to keep his eyes on the road when he rode the bike. There was a clump of spring bulbs blooming on the median strip, crocuses perhaps, most of them were vivid with the colour. She pointed to an apartment above a restaurant, the drapes open. The walls were painted in the colour. “Imagine that, surrounded by it all the time. You wouldn’t be able to fight would you? It’d keep reminding you that you belonged together,” she said cheerfully, seeming unaware of the irony of saying that to the guy she’d dismissed and run away from at the moment that she discovered what they were to each other. Apart from those patches of pure colour the cool, clear sunlight revealed that the new grass was no longer simply the green he had always seen, at the roots the new colour shone through the blades. The glass and concrete of the modern buildings were shaded with it too, gracing the brutalist architecture with human feeling and the granite gleamed with it. In a cemetery that they passed every other marker had the colour somewhere as a poignant reminder of love and loss. He wondered who was better off in the mournful walk from the graveside, those who saw the colour or those that didn’t.

Eventually they reached their destination and he realised she was taking him to the Museum of Fine Art. He’d considered going on several occasions but had never followed through, intimidated by the imposing architecture. He had the feeling that it wasn’t for people like him, people with a gang tattoo and an only recently expunged juvie record. Betty, with her unironic ear muffs and her unquestioned assumption that cities and their institutions had been created by and for folks exactly like her, belonged here. They definitely didn’t belong here together. She swept into the atrium without a moment’s equivocation or hesitation and picked up a diagram showing the collections and holding it out to him. “So I’d like to see the cubism exhibition but what are your favourites? We can plan a route.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to a gallery before.”

“This gallery?” she said, a little confusion in her eyes.

“Any gallery. My childhood was not full of cultural expeditions. Unless you count the drive-in or the prison visits.”

“Shit, Jug. I’m so sorry. I want to know about that.” She was holding his arm and looking at him with those eyes and the feathers in his soul ruffled. He was going to have to wring that thing’s neck and soon. They were not, and never would be, a pair. “Okay, let me show you the thing I like and you just tell me if you want to see anything else? Is that okay?” He shrugged. It’d soon be over anyway.

When she showed him art that she loved, it was like a glimpse inside her head and her heart. He knew nothing about painting and so he had no frame of reference but if he’d had to guess her style before she showed him what she enjoyed he’d have imagined that she would choose precise little pictures of girls in pretty dresses and handsome men on horses, artists who made accurate representations of silk and lace, shiny furniture and jewels or maybe flowers. There was a painting he’d seen in a movie of a girl with striking eyes, blue and yellow fabric over her hair, that seemed the kind of thing. Instead she swept past room after room of portraits and landscapes with barely a second glance until she was in a room surrounded by vivid colours and clean shapes. The paintings had a feeling of being lit from within and seemed to glow in prismatic shades. They were amusing, an image of Adam and Eve where Adam sported a stripy old fashioned bathing suit, acrobats and cyclists rendered in bold flat colours. She grinned at him in delight surrounded by the pictures as she pointed out the construction workers and folks at leisure, going on excursions in the countryside on their bicycles. “It’s so optimistic,” she said. “It looks for the good and the beautiful in real life and finds it. Look here, he uses this heavy black outline but sometimes he doesn’t bother to paint inside it. It doesn’t need to be perfect because it’s joyful.” He liked the paintings, enjoyed the detail in them but he found his favourite in another room. A young man in a suit beamed out from the canvas, holding the hand of a beautiful girl in a pink dress who floated in the air beside him. At his feet there was a picnic blanket with a carafe of wine. The fields were rendered in shades of emerald and their colour reminding him of the fresh shoots of grass they had seen on their way to the gallery. It was almost cartoonish in its execution but when he looked at it his heart leapt and he found that he was smiling. She reached for his hand as he stood in front of it. “You have a good eye. It’s Chagall.” He stood and looked at the painting for a few more minutes, enjoying the way it lightened his mood. He noticed that when he looked away from the canvas he was able to pick out the colour more easily in the other paintings in the room. It seemed able to do some rewiring in his brain.

“Tired?” she asked and he realised that he was. 

He nodded, “I don’t know why, just from looking at stuff.”

“That happens. Art fires off all your synapses and has them making connections all over the place. If it doesn’t make you tired you’re dead inside and you’re definitely not that. Come on, let’s get some food. We can come back another day.” She led him back through the rooms, still holding his hand as he struggled to remember why he was about to tell her that there wouldn’t be any more gallery dates. Outside she looked around, clearly wondering where they should go to eat so he took charge and dragged her to one of his favourite diners where everything immediately went to shit.

As they sat down she said, “Tell me about the hat.”

“What about it?”

“Why don’t you ever take it off? You were wearing it on Friday night when you were asleep on the couch.”

“I do take it off,” he lied. “I just feel the cold.”

“Sure,” she said, so he swept it off to make a point and put it on the seat next to him, giving her a defiant look. He looked at the menu and began to plan his meal. “I’ve been reading about colour,” she said.

“What about it?”

“There’s a theory that says that you can’t see a colour until you have an idea of it. Like if a language doesn’t have a word for a colour the people who speak that language just can’t distinguish that colour from another. It’s like with … our colour, somehow we got the thought of the colour triggered in our brain and then we could see it.

“In some languages they don’t have separate words for all the primary colours, just dark and light or warm and cool and those people can’t really see the difference between orange and pink or grey and blue. In Greek they have two different words for blue, one for light and one for dark. If a Greek person comes and lives here for years they start to see both of those colours as more similar that their relatives who stayed in Athens or wherever. Isn’t that interesting?”

“I guess. We make the world out of ideas. It’s like in movies about space.” She looked at him, curiosity in her amazing eyes and he felt warmed by her interest in what he was about to say. “Okay so now when they create CGI spaceships they don’t make them look like realistic spaceships. They make them look like models of spaceships. The Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, the space station in 2001 were all models so we learned that’s what spacecraft look like. So now we won’t believe in things that look like real spacecraft, we want them to look like the models. And when some billionaire makes a real spacecraft they make them look like the ones we’ve seen in movies. It just cycles round and round. We make the world in the image of our ideas because anything else is unbelievable to us.”

She continued to look at him, taking a deep breath before saying, “I have a confession to make.”

He raised an eyebrow and she ploughed on. “I read your books yesterday, the published ones anyway.” 

He put the menu down on the table and stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Forsythia Pendleton. I read both of them. I really liked them, they were so good. I burned through them in no time. Page turners.”

He considered denying it but it seemed pointless and anyway, he reminded himself, he wasn’t going to be seeing her again so what did it matter? “How did you find out?”

“Okay, that’s another confession. I told you that, when it first happened, I talked to my roommate about you. I told her that one reason why I didn’t want to start anything with you was that I’d heard a rumour you had a criminal record, so she said she’d check. Her sister’s a PI. Over Christmas Veronica, my friend, got back to me. She said you once had a record but that it was expunged and she said that maybe, if the law had forgotten it, that I should do the same. Anyway I did some soul searching and decided she was right. Part of what I’m learning at the clinic is not to judge people, I don’t know what they’ve had to deal with so I have no right. So that was when I decided we should meet up and talk. Anyway Veronica told me your real name, she thought it meant you must come from money or something because it’s so fancy.” He rolled his eyes at that idea. “So then when I saw the name on the manuscript the other night I knew it must be your pen name.” 

He’d listened in silence, his resolve hardening with every word she said. When she stopped talking he glared at her until she seemed to shrink back in the booth. “Listen Princess,” he said in a hissing whisper, remembering how she hated to be made into a spectacle, “much as I appreciate you condescending to have anything to do with me despite knowing that I have an insalubrious backstory, I really don’t need you to stoop so low. I didn’t ask you to read that stuff, I support myself with it, I buy the things my sister needs that my parents are too useless to buy for her. I’m not ashamed even though I’m sure you think I should be. Anyway, I don’t need to be patronised by you. Have a nice life. I’m sure it’s a relief to you that I don’t want any part of it. Bye.” He stood and stomped out and was at the end of the block before he realised he’d left his hat.


	3. Love Called Out the Heavy Artillery

On Monday evening Kev threw open his bedroom door without knocking, tossed his beanie at him and walked out, slamming the door behind him. So now she was poisoning his few friends against him too. He flew after Kevin and confronted him in the kitchen, Fangs sitting at the counter, murmuring, "C'mon now guys," in a conciliatory tone that they both disregarded.

“What the actual fuck Kev? You’re on her side now? You’ve known me almost two years and her ten minutes. Way to go on the loyalty front.”

“Some might argue that when someone you care about is being a dick it’s your responsibility to call him on his shit.”

“How the fuck can this be my fault? How’s she spun that? I did nothing at all. She never liked me, never made any secret of it. I’m supposed to be at her beck and call, she invades my privacy and I’m supposed to be thrilled that she’ll forgive me for the shit show that was my childhood. Fuck her. And actually, fuck you too. I hope you’ll all be very happy together.” 

He spun on his heel, and went back into his room, ignoring Kevin when he yelled. “Did you tell her? How the hell is she supposed to know about it when you’ve never told her anything real about yourself? How could she like you when she’s never really met you?”

He sat on the edge of his bed, breathing hard and clenching and unclenching his fists. Then he put on his hat and crawled between the sheets.

It was hard to put her out of his mind. The colour was everywhere and much as he tried to concentrate on his MFA applications and the subsequent anxious wait for decisions, she was living rent free in his head. He’d apologised to Kevin and Fangs for the yelling, Kevin had hugged him and he’d tolerated it and things had gone back to normal, except that he was no longer invited to cabaret nights, presumably because she would be there. She’d texted a couple of times and he’d ignored the messages. He kept intending to block her number but somehow never got around to it. He knew it was better for both of them to just stay away from each other but blocking seemed so irrevocable. After what seemed like an interminable wait he got the notification that he was accepted onto his second choice writing programme with a pretty good stipend and accepted the offer without waiting for the other decisions. The Forsythia book came out, the bank account began to look a little healthier, he sent JB the cash to buy a car, he was on the up and up. That made it all the more unsatisfactory that he felt so low.

He was in the library one afternoon as March was going out like a lamb, trying to get ahead of final term papers when Jellybean called him. She was a senior in high school so a voice call was a rare honour and he ducked into a stairwell to answer. She thanked him yet again for the money and told him she wanted to come and stay with him for spring break. All of her friends were off to some resort which she couldn’t afford without depleting the college fund and she didn’t want to be the only one left behind in boring Toledo. He started to think about how he could find the money to let her kick back with her pals but she was ahead of him, “Before you say it I don’t even want to go Jug. They’ll be drinking and acting stupid. I don’t need to spend a lot of cash to see that, we’ve both seen enough drunk idiots to last a lifetime. I’d honestly rather come see you, especially if you’re going to be way out in California next year when I’m at college in Philly. Is it okay? Can I come?”

He said he was delighted to have her. When he mentioned it to Fangs he said that she could have his room, he’d go and stay at Kevin’s for a few days practising for their post graduation future in New York. Jughead planned the week carefully and eagerly anticipated his sister's arrival. They did the Freedom Trail and had a chilly picnic on the Commons, they went to the movies and he took her to all of his preferred diners. On her last day he was at something of a loss until inspiration struck and he took her to the gallery. He avoided the Leger paintings that Betty liked, uncomfortable with seeing those again since they’d make him feel the loss of her. He couldn’t forego the Chagall though. He stepped into the room, stopping abruptly so that JB crashed into him as he said “Oh fuck.” Betty stood from the bench where she had been sitting, staring at the painting and opened and closed her mouth without saying anything.

He became aware of JB standing right behind him. She whistled softly and muttered, “Shit,” under her breath.

Betty grabbed her holdall and stepped over to them, looking down at her feet. “Hey Jug. I’ll let you have the room. I know you love this one.”

As she began to walk past them, Jellybean looked at her brother accusingly and touched her arm. “Hey, don’t go. It doesn’t belong to us. You can look at it too.” Betty smiled sadly and looked up at him. He would have been fine if she hadn’t looked at him but her eyes were too much to bear and he took a step back to try to protect himself. As he flailed Jellybean took up the slack. “Hi, I’m the kid sister, JB. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Betty, I’m Betty. It’s good to meet you too. Look, I have to get going anyway. I have clinic this afternoon. Jug, in case I don’t see you, I’m sorry I was a snob but I really don’t think it was just me that was close-minded. I don’t think the universe makes mistakes, I think we did. Have a good visit JB. It was nice to meet you.” She walked away, her sneakers squeaking on the shiny floor. He stared at the Chagall like maybe he could read the answer to his life’s problems there. The hills were still the colour, their colour.

“Who was she?” JB demanded but he really couldn’t frame an answer. “Why can’t you talk? Oh wait, she’s _her_ isn’t she? Oh shit Jug. You’ve messed it up haven’t you?”

That was too unjust. Everyone naturally assumed it was his fault. “Yeah that’s her but she’s not interested in me. She thought I was a creep and a criminal. So it never even got started. There was nothing to mess up. So…” 

“Well I don’t know anything about soulmates, neither of us do apparently but she’s yours. We know what happens when you lose that. You have to do everything you can to make it work, look at what happened to Mom and Dad. Will you call her at least? Please Jug.” He’d already begun to shake his head when she played her ace. “For me?” 

Because he was constitutionally unable to refuse his sister anything he shrugged and texted her, showing JB the message and letting her press send before she got on the train back to Ohio. “Diner near gallery 1p.m. Tuesday?” She texted back “K” before the train had pulled out of the station. He didn’t know how to feel about that. 

“Hey,” she said on Tuesday, taking a seat opposite him, arranging her various bags and her jacket and, unbelievably, a tennis racquet, scrutinising him with those damn eyes.

“Hey. My sister thought we should talk but I have a thing at three so…”

“Okay. I deserve that. I screwed up. But you screwed up too. I have a list.” She reached into a bag for a notebook and it made him want to smile, of course she had a list. He set his mouth into a firm line refusing to give ground in the first skirmish. “I wanted to start by telling you…,” she pursed her lips and he saw the blush rising up her neck and flushing her cheeks. He wished she wouldn’t. It was distracting. She took a deep, decisive breath. “…by telling you, in the clearest way I can, that I had this huge crush on you in freshman year, like kind of a sexual thing.” Now he was blushing too. “I’m not saying this as a come on or anything, I want you to understand why I was so mean to you when we started editing the magazine. See, I hadn’t really felt like that before. I had boyfriends, obviously, but this was different. I couldn’t stop thinking about you…like that. And it scared me. I set myself pretty tough standards, academically…well in everything actually… and I always work hard, maybe too hard. I was scared to even talk to you because either you wouldn’t be interested which would hurt, or you would and I was scared that it would take over my life, that I’d be eaten up by it, that I wanted to be eaten up by it. I’d flunk out of school because I’d spend all day in bed, sprawled out like one of the women in those terrible Victorian paintings.” He shrugged partly to indicate that he didn’t know the paintings and partly to counter the implications and associations of the word _sprawled_. “Anyway I shut it down in my head, held you at more than arm’s length and was kind of a bitch to you. But it wasn’t about you. It was about me being scared of myself, of what I wanted. Does that make any sense?”

“Yeah, you’re saying it’s not me it’s you. Classic.”

“God, I so knew you wouldn't be able to hear that. That’s on my list too. Remember on the beach, you had that long metaphor about Chinese food? You said we can only process what we let in, right?” He nodded, cautious, waiting to see where she was taking this. “I said it was like confirmation bias. And that’s what you do, well, okay, what we both do. If I say something to you that you can possibly hear as a slight or a criticism or a rejection, you latch onto it. If I say something that’s positive you ignore it. I don’t know why you do it because you don’t talk much about your past. I do it because that’s what I’m used to hearing at home. I expect to be criticised because I always have been so I try to get ahead of it by being more prepared, more focused, harder working. Anyway from what I just said, you took that I was rejecting you again, not that I said that you were so sexy that I was scared to be near you. Like you said, classic.”

He found that he liked her saying that, it affected him despite his best intentions. He needed to get back on the offensive or she’d make him want her and then at the last minute she'd take away the idea that they’d be together. It was the first game he'd ever learned, his dad holding out a piece of candy and then throwing it into his own mouth when Jug reached for it. "Too slow kid."

“You had me investigated by a private eye. That seems like a pretty hard rejection to me. It’s certainly not an endorsement.”

“I did do that. I’m sorry. I should have asked you about your life but what would you have told me? You keep all of that stuff so close to your chest, you don’t share any of it. You gave me hints about prison visits and living with another family but I never get the whole story. Back when the whole colour thing happened before Christmas, I freaked out. I’d planned out this idea of how my life was going to be. I had a template. And then the universe sent me you. You were not what I imagined for myself, not worse, just a surprise. I’ve been thinking about what I’d expected, maybe a man like my dad. Someone quiet, a little dull and pedestrian. My dad just appeases my mom and does as he’s told. Mainly he keeps out of her way and plays a lot of golf. They aren’t soulmates. She got pregnant in high school so they had to make the best of it together. Being with him has let her become sort of a monster. She’s judgemental and uptight and repressed. She’s controlling and angry. And I could be that. I know how to be that. She’s shown me. She taught me to be scared of sex because that was what stole the future she dreamed of from her. She was a teenage mother when that meant no college, no career. She married a man she doesn’t respect, so no soulmate. She’s bourgeois and conservative because all she has are possessions and if they don’t prove that she’s better than other people, that she’s won, well, then her whole life is futile. She hates anyone who lives differently to her because that means she could have rejected the life she’s condemned herself to. If she didn’t have to get married, if she could have struck out independently instead, it would make her unhappiness her own fault. So I can see the colour of that life. I told you about not being able to see a shade until you have a name for it, until you’ve learned to see it. You’ve let me see another way I could be, another colour that just wasn’t there for me before. I’ve been imagining a life lived on my own terms, a life that doesn’t have to follow vacuous rules, a life with desire and passion because I met you and I rode on your motorcycle and I imagined how it would be to live with an artist rather than a man who works a 9 to 5, a man with a past that he’s overcome, a man I desire. Now I can see it I can choose that instead. And I do choose it, with or without you. I’m going to choose not to become her because you show me a different colour. I’m grateful for that -- whatever happens.”

He felt the solid ground of his decisions shifting under him so he dug in his heels. “I don’t know what you want me to say. We’re too different. You always have all this stuff that you’re carrying around, like this goddamn tennis racquet. All my baggage is emotional. There’s no common ground to stand on to build anything even if we wanted to.”

“It’s a badminton racquet,” she corrected him, and then shook her head at the distraction and returned to her list. “Last point. I’ve been saying I don’t have to be what I thought. I don’t have to be pent up and unfulfilled. I don’t have to have my planner filled in for every hour of the day for the next six months. I don’t have to reject people without understanding their stories. I’m still inclined to it, sure, but I can choose to be another way. I think you’re the same. You have an idea of yourself that isn’t really you. At least it doesn’t have to be you. That day on the beach I was picking up sea glass and you started to pick up pieces and hand them to me, seeing it mattered to me and making it matter to you too. You were running your thumb over the edges so you didn’t hand me something sharp. It was so caring. There’s something nurturing and gentle and protective in you even though, I guess, maybe you haven’t been shown that too much.” 

He laughed harshly, took a swig of his coffee and checked the time on his phone. “You keep telling yourself that Princess but there are plenty of folks in Riverdale who would beg to disagree.”

“I know you’ve had to be tough. I can tell. But you aren’t just that guy. You’re Forsythia Pendleton too.”

“I write junk romance for cash Betty. Don’t get confused. Suckers will pay for that shit so I give them what they want. That’s capitalism, sweetheart.”

“But you could write anything. You write these gorgeous historical romances when you could write sci fi or horror or erotica or anything. I’m not saying that that’s the whole of you but it is part of who you are. You couldn’t write those and not be a romantic. There’s part of you that is sensitive and longing and tender and loves Chagall. You won’t let yourself see him. But I see him and he’s you. And that’s why you got so mad when I read the books. I see that colour in you and you could let yourself see it too.”

He snorted and grabbed his messenger bag. “You tell yourself whatever you need to Princess. I need to get going. Good talk though.” He stood but she grabbed his hand.

“Think about it Jug, but not for too long, I’m leaving in a couple of months. Before you go…”. She stood up in front of him and tilted her face to his and reached up to draw him nearer, placing a soft kiss on his cheek. It was a sweet, innocent gesture. He could have permitted it and then walked away but something deep in him couldn’t have her lips brush over his skin and then disappear so he twisted his head and kissed her mouth, hard and long and deep. He held the back of her head as he bit gently on her lower lip, closing his eyes and seeing an explosion of their colour behind his eyelids. Her tongue was against his mouth and he opened and stroked over it with his, bending her gently backwards to press more of her body against his. When he stood her upright she was panting and her eyes were intense with that shade as she stared at him, the colour pounding on his heart. 

“Something to think about,” he murmured as he shouldered his bag and left, trying to suppress his own arousal at the heaving of her breasts. 

He skipped his professor’s office hours. He was in no state to discuss the draft of his paper on Baudelaire in any case. He went and smoked cigarette after cigarette by the monument to John Endecott, enjoying the fact that the old Puritan, who would have been outraged by everything about him, was dead while Jughead lived, lived and had been kissed by a spectacular girl who wanted him. He pulled at a loose thread on his sweater as he considered what she had said to him. She was trying to choose a better path for herself than the one her mother had taken. She thought he could help her. He wondered if he could choose a better way to be a man than the one his father had shown him. It occurred to him that slowly, incrementally, he’d been trapped by other people’s ideas of who he should be. He thought about the boy that he’d been once and wondered if he’d misjudged him. He’d tried to make himself someone his mother could love, tried to be a good enough son that his dad would stop drinking and neglecting him, tried not to be troublesome to the Andrews, hiding his rage and fear, tried to be a good Serpent by quashing his compassion and his horror, tried to be what he thought a college man should be, smart and cynical. It reminded him of the opening of Gulliver’s travels, the strings binding Gulliver one by one, each one flimsy individually, but when so many of them were tying him down eventually they became too strong to break. Perhaps her seeing who he could be could cut those strings and let him stand on his own feet with the courage to be who he really was. She seemed to have cut her own ties, she said that he had helped her, or that the colour had.

She thought that there was something soft and vulnerable in him, that he could break free of cynicism and anger. If she was right it meant that he’d be able to kiss the girl again. Maybe that was what the universe intended for him. It occurred to him that love was more complicated than he’d imagined. He’d thought that he’d see an extra colour not that everything would be transformed by its addition. When he’d woken up that morning with Roz in his arms, he’d thought that he could simply add her to his life, protect her, give her the kisses and the flowers that he’d thought signified love. Betty wouldn’t ever accept that. She wanted him to examine every part of who he was, probe the scar tissue, scrape away the scabs and the callouses and face her without the protection that he’d come to rely upon. She didn’t want flowers, she wanted his excoriated soul. Finally he thought he understood why she and not Roz had been chosen for him.

He went home and spent the rest of the afternoon making a list of things he would need to tell her, of the truths about his life that he would need to look at with her. He still didn’t know if he was prepared to do it but it helped to see it written down. By the time he’d finished, he realised that she had already changed him a little. He was now a list guy apparently. It was after seven when he rode over to the fancy building in Ashmont and sat outside, astride the bike, wondering if he was going to go to her or if he would simply roar away into the lonely future to which he had almost resigned himself. She might be at work anyway. The sun was setting behind the buildings and its descent revealed the colour splashing the windows, dazzling. If it had just been about him he might have abandoned the whole project but if he was a coward then she would never know the transcendence that Kevin and Fangs had talked about. He’d be denying her and that seemed to carry more weight with him than his own disappointment. His phone pinged and when he looked at it he saw she had texted, “Come up. You’re driving me crazy sitting out there like James Dean.” When he looked at the building he saw her in an illuminated window looking down at him. The sun rose in her even as it set behind the city. He climbed off the bike and walked to the door in a dream and she opened it as he approached.

He found himself sitting on her bed holding a coffee mug but unable to speak. Her roommate was entertaining a gentleman caller in the living room so Betty conducted him straight into her room. He looked at her neat desk, piled with huge textbooks and well ordered files. She had two jelly jars, one holding pencils and highlighters and the other, a posy of flowers. She must work with them by her. They were the colour, the colour that neither of them called by its name. It had always seemed too huge a step, too intimate, to call the colour love but that was its name and that is what it was.

"How are you paying for this place anyway?" he asked.

"Veronica offered to sub me. It was almost unbearable at first but now we joke about it. I find that you can choose what to get bent out of shape about."

He nodded, thinking about that. “I decided to tell you who I was before I was this,” he said at last. “Then if you don’t want who I am or who I have been at least I know that you had the full picture. I’m not expecting anything from you. That isn’t how it’s ever worked for me.” She nodded and sat on the upright chair by the desk, holding her own coffee mug in interlaced fingers, trying to keep from fidgeting. “You talked about your mom.” She nodded and he began to tell her about how his mother had been tricked by his dad and had her life stolen. “She took my sister and left when I was eleven. She wouldn’t say anything to me as she was packing up. I was crying and watching her as she grabbed Jellybean’s things but not mine. I couldn’t believe that she was going to leave me behind even while I knew that she would. I tried to hold onto her as she walked out. I told her I’d be good, I wouldn’t make her mad anymore, I wouldn’t complain about being hungry, I’d be quiet, she wouldn’t even notice me. She didn’t say anything. She just left. And I felt ashamed that I’d cried and yelled and nothing had made any difference so I told myself that I wouldn’t ever do that again, not for anyone. You can’t argue someone into loving you, can’t will it into being, there’s no incantation or rhetoric that’ll work.” She nodded, so she had learned that too. “Then it was me and the old man. He drank and he was in a gang so he was gone a lot, lock up or drug runs or benders, so I didn’t go to school much. My mom had left these cheap grocery store romance novels in the trailer when she went. She had finally understood that they were a lie, but to me, alone, scared, confused, they seemed like hope. Like another world where I could find connection and possibility. I read them all. There wasn’t anything to eat, so I stole. I was burning up inside, so I set a fire at my school and was sent to a boys’ home for a while. I was dirty and hungry and angry and so bigger kids beat me up which made me angrier. I learned how to hate them before they hated me, so it hurt less when they laughed at me. By the time high school started I was kind of feral. There was one kid, Archie, who’d been my best pal once, who never bullied me. He stood up for me when I was getting beaten up. He was a good guy, soft hearted. He told his folks that I wasn’t okay and his dad drove over and told me that when things were bad I could stay with them. It felt bad to rely on their charity but I had no options left. They were good to me even though I was never going to be their kid. Archie and I had nothing in common so I was a dead weight around his neck, the weirdo dragging down the reputation of the quarterback. My dad would get sober and I’d go back to the trailer, then he’d fall off the wagon again and I’d be back at Archie’s feeling embarrassed to exist. I had a job at the drive-in, I wrote stories like the ones in my mom’s books, I read, I bided my time until I could get out on my own, making myself small, staying quiet.”

“None of that was your fault Jug, you didn’t choose any of that,” she protested. He wanted to leave the story there while she could still think well of him, pity him instead of being scared of him but that wasn’t the deal he’d made with himself.

“Then my dad was sent to jail, not just lockup this time. He’d helped someone dispose of a body and got convicted. Archie’s dad said I could go back to them but I was sick of being a burden so I told them I would look out for myself, had to be a dick to make them let me alone. And then I joined my dad’s gang.” Her eyes widened at that and he found that he wanted her to understand. “No-one had ever wanted me. No-one ever saw me as anything but a nuisance. I’d always been a burden to someone until they could shake me off. I wanted to belong, to be relied on. I wanted to contribute something. Mainly what I contributed was hurting people. There were some drug runs. Then there was a kind of internecine war in the gang and I was caught up in it. I injured someone pretty badly.” He stopped and looked at her, trying to find the fear and disgust that he was sure must appear in her expression. He couldn’t find it so he pushed harder. “It was a woman that I hurt.” There was a flicker in her eyes but it lasted only a moment. “I cut her. I cut off her gang tattoo. She had her revenge later though.” He wrenched down the neck of his sweater so that she could see the strange, pale ridges where his own serpent had been excised from his bicep. She reached forward and ran her fingertips across the scar. He watched her touch but there was no sensation in his skin there, it was as if her fingers touched someone else’s flesh. Perhaps it had been someone else, it certainly felt like another life. He pulled the collar back up to hide the mark and continued.

“Anyway violence, drugs, a lot of fear and shame. It could have been worse I guess.” He looked up and her eyes were the colour of love and filled with tears. He felt humiliated, like he was begging for her indulgence. There was a knot of hard anger and fear in his belly but he’d come here to do this and he was going to finish before he slunk away. “Anyway I caught a break at last. The scholarship was my ticket. I got to college, not dirty and undersized and pathetic anymore. I found people would listen to me when I talked, not just because I had a flick knife at their throat, that ideas mattered here not just how far you could throw a pigskin or how many times you’d get up when you’d been knocked down, that girls wanted to be near me instead of laughing at me. I got a publisher for one of my stories so there was a little money at last. It all felt different for a while. But actually people don’t respect you if you're always mouthing off smart remarks and the girls didn’t really like me, just something about the way I looked. Realising that made me feel even more lonely. I thought if I saw the colour then it would be better. There would be someone for me, I would have an ally at last. But it didn’t happen quite like that. I’ve been so angry and I don’t want that anymore but I’m scared that if I lay my anger aside, the loneliness will come back and I can’t bear that either so I just don’t know ...”

She put down her mug and approached him cautiously as if he would spook and run from her. “I’m so sorry that you didn’t have love and safety Jug. Thank you for telling me. I can’t make that better for you but I’d like to be with you while you make peace with it. I’d like to try to help you heal.”

“I don’t want to bring you down Betty. I don’t want to make your life harder with shit that you didn’t sign up for.”

She knelt by the bed and rested her head on his knees. “We both have baggage Jug. I don’t want to carry mine alone anymore but I don’t want anyone but you to help me with it. You understand it. I want it to be you who calls me out when I’m being intolerant and judgemental because you’ve been on the other side and know how that feels. And I want to be the one that helps you not to hide behind all that cynicism and introversion. I don’t want someone who’s the same as me, reinforcing all my prejudices, I want someone to help me fill in my blind spots, feel how it is for you rather than just knowing it intellectually. It's the difference between knowing the wavelength and frequency of a colour and actually experiencing it. With you I can see it. Let’s see it all together.” He reached out to stroke her hair and she sighed at his touch. His heart leapt to hear it and he realised that he was weeping. She looked up at him and stood to wrap her arms around him even as he tried to dash away the tears, terrified by the weakness they revealed.

“Hey Jug,” she whispered, and he looked into her eyes that were the colour of love. “I love that you feel things deeply. It’s beautiful. I love that Chagall moves you and that you write romance novels. I love those tears. I love you.”

He pulled her towards him until she was sitting on his lap and then he kissed her tenderly, pulling back to murmur, “I love you too Betty. I love your lists and your luggage, I love that you’re trying to know yourself. And I’m pretty impressed by the rack too.”

She laughed at that and reached down to the hem of her sweater. “Let’s follow up that thought shall we?” she said as she pulled it off over her head.

The hype was true. As he stroked down her side, his hands glancing across her breast, he saw his fingers trailing her skin with colour as if his hands were covered with pigment. When she touched him, he didn’t simply feel the caress, he saw it too. It seemed to him that he had been living in monochrome but, as she ran her fingers lightly down his chest and over his belly, his skin was painted in living technicolour. The light touches seemed lilac and violet, when she dragged her nails over his nipples they stained him with magenta and crimson. When she licked over his collar bones and blew gently to cool his flesh the trail was azure and teal. And then there was taste. When he kissed her stomach the smooth, pale skin tasted fragrant and delicious, a sun warmed peach, sweet and fresh. He tried to tint every inch of her with his touch, saturate her with colour, running his lips, amber, across her nipples, feeling her body quivering in response to him, the hues deepening from cerulean to sapphire, lavender to amethyst, all of them tinted with their colour. “Do you see it?” he whispered and she looked into his eyes and her irises were the most intense and fathomless shade of love that he had yet seen and he knew that she did. 

He kissed her hipbones in garnet and coral, ran his lips over her stomach, brought her to a shivering climax with his mouth, tasting her pleasure, cardamon and dates. When she pushed him back against the pillows, still giddy from her orgasm he felt himself falling through colour and scent, words whispering in his mind, “a feathered thing,” “petal by petal,” “done with the compass, done with the charts.” Her mouth on him so soft, so warm, a hue like the flesh of a pomegranate. Her eyes were the colour of love as she looked up at him, her hair a golden cascade, his heart trembling in time with his body as he thundered to his end, her hair brushing his belly with ochre and vermillion. When he kissed her again with the soft sweetness of her still on his tongue, he could taste himself, darker, smokier, molasses and bourbon. 

Eventually, both of them drunk with each other and the revelation of love, he moved inside her. He expected the colour of the sensation to be dark and iridescent, a raven’s wing, Rimbaud’s "black velvety jacket of brilliant flies” but instead there was the soft welcoming pigment of dandelions and butter, deepening to rich orange and burnt Sienna as she gasped his name and whispered endearments against his ear. They were the colours of joy. He held onto her as if he were immersed in sunlight and repeated her name like a mantra. As they came, he was dissolved by it, floating on light, dispersed and mingled with her and the room seemed entirely their colour. 

He lay on his back beside her, his hand laying loosely, low on her belly, unable to speak or think, shipwrecked by the experience and left half drowned. Eventually she rolled towards him and kissed his shoulder. “We must never leave this bed.” Her voice was soft and slow, sleep drifting over her.

He smiled at her. “We’ll lie here and have servants bring us sherbet and sweetmeats and we’ll make love every hour on the hour,” he replied softly and slept too. 

When he opened his eyes it was to the gasping terror of remembering that in nine weeks he was moving to LA. He flung himself out of her bed and stood naked on the rug, barely registering the ridiculousness of his twitching morning erection. She gasped in shock at his sudden transition from soft and embracing to upright and yelling, “Fuck my life!” She blinked rapidly to try to understand his difficulty.

“What is it? Are you hurt? Oh that looks troublesome. Would you like me to…” she said with a nod, concern and desire comingled in her expression.

“MFA. In LA. California. I accepted it already. How am I going to get out of it?”

“It’s okay, I know. Kev told me. Irvine, right?”

“West Coast.”

“Yes Jug, that’s where California is. Calm down. I’m starting grad school at Cal State. I couldn’t say anything before or you’d have thought I was stalking you but I honestly just picked it because it was as far away from my mother as I could get while still in the Continental US. So, stop panicking and come back here so I can help you with your…situation.”

He stared at her while he registered what she had said. “So it’s just coincidence?” he asked, suspicious that anything good could happen by accident.

“Fate? Coincidence? Synchronicity? The fact that LA has the largest number of schools in the country? One of those I guess,” she smiled. “You can choose to see it however you like.”

### EPILOGUE 

Jellybean was sitting in stately grandeur on a carved chair while Parveet’s oldest sister worked on the intricate and beautiful henna designs on her hands and feet that were the ostensible focus of the day’s celebration. He took a seat on a cushion safely out of the artist’s way while other members of the groom’s family bustled around ensuring that no guest was left without food or drink for even a moment. JB grinned at him. “Ah, more sage advice. I swear the mehndi is just a way to keep the bride from running away screaming when someone else gives some some gem of wisdom. What’s it to be big brother, marriage is hard? You have to work at it everyday?”

He returned her smile. “No. It isn’t hard. Not if you have a good partner, and we all know that you do. He’s great.” They both looked over to where Parveet was passing around a tray of some kind of luminously lime green sweets. “What’s hard, little sis, is living a good, worthwhile life. It’s not easy to be the person you want to be, to be a person you respect and like. That’s really fucking difficult, and you have to keep working on it every single day. And the person you marry works on that with you and you work on it with them, making sure that you aren’t kidding yourselves or giving yourselves a free pass to be less that you want to be or accept the status quo. And it has to be about who you both want to be for yourselves, not who you want them to be or they want you to be. That means you have to really see each other and accept what you choose. So marriage isn’t hard, it’s a great way to make the challenge of living a good life tolerable, if you do it right.” He looked over at his wife and she caught his eye and slowly began to make her way towards them.

When he looked back at JB he saw that there were tears in her eyes. “I love you and her Jug. It’s what I want in my marriage.” Her emotion, the occasion, the line of tiny crowns that he noticed that Saavi had drawn into the design around JB’s wrist, his wife smiling as she lurched across the room, a hand at her back to brace herself, all conspired to make his own eyes wet. “Take him away Betty, he’s getting far too sentimental. And don’t steal focus by having the baby on my wedding day. I’m warning you.”

Betty laughed. “Three whole weeks yet JB. Come on marshmallow, my feet hurt. Take me home for sherbet and sweetmeats.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On colour perception, I mention the idea that colour is a secondary property which was so popular with the empiricists like Locke. The idea is that an object really has a property like its size or shape but it isn't "really" red or blue. It merely has the power to produce that sensation in an observer with certain sensory apparatus. I also mention in a very simplistic way the debate regarding the universality or relativism of colour perception. Anna Wierzbicka is an interesting source on this but Lera Boroditsky has a great Ted talk which breaks it down pretty well. I also glancingly refer to the classic thought experiment "Mary's Room," by Frank Jackson. It's brilliant and introduces the notion of qualia in a wonderfully clear way but was a little heavy for this piece but it asks us to think about what extra knowledge we gain when we see a colour as opposed to simply knowing all the information about it. What is that extra experiential information?- what philosophers call qualia- usually while making a weird little rubbing gesture with our thumbs and forefingers. It's the universal language of geekdom!
> 
> I mention a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Here's the relevant stanza,  
>  _“Hope” is the thing with feathers -_  
>  _That perches in the soul -_  
>  _And sings the tune without the words -_  
>  _And never stops - at all -_
> 
> Jughead's taking a course in French Symbolist poetry and quotes Rimbaud which is something that Jug might get away with but I don't recommend as a way to make friends. Rimbaud is thought to have had synasthesia as demonstrated in his poem ["Voyelles."](https://www.poetica.fr/poeme-536/arthur-rimbaud-voyelles/)
> 
> This story is set in Boston but I have given the Museum of Fine Art some paintings which it does not have.  
> The painter that Betty is fond of is [Fernand Léger](https://www.wikiart.org/en/fernand-leger)  
> The painting that Jughead likes is [The Promenade by Chagall](http://www.chagallpaintings.com/promenade/) which is actually in St Petersburg.
> 
> The title of the story is from a song by the best band in the world, The Mountain Goats. You can listen to John Darnielle perform it [here.](https://youtu.be/fKkX53TYnCg)
> 
> The line "petal by petal" is e.e. cummings. The whole stanza is  
> "your slightest look easily will unclose me  
> though i have closed myself as fingers,  
> you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens  
> (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose"
> 
> "done with the compass, done with the chart" is Dickinson again from her poem Wild Nights.
> 
> The terrible Victorian paintings that Betty disparages are by John William Godward. I had A Siesta in particular in my mind. He's the painter who wrote in his suicide note that the world wasn't big enough for both him and Picasso (!).  
> 


End file.
